Dilbert Does Priming

• A man looks at a dollar sign and suddenly stops acting generous or helpful;
• A smiley face on a Coca-Cola can lead customers to drink more of the beverage;
• Images of organic and environmentally friendly products cause us to act more altruistic;
• Women feel more confident if they give a talk while looking at an image of a powerful female figure like Angela Merkel or Hillary Clinton;
• Just looking at an Apple logo or the colours green or blue makes us feel more creative;
• A a cluttered desktop screen lead us to make worse and more biased system 1 decisions.
• We can increase workplace happiness by asking employees to bite on a pencil – as it turns our mouth into a smile (way to save money on employee satisfaction programmes!);
• We can increase employee confidence level with 25% by asking them to stand in a power pose for just 2 min.

Yes, we are talking about priming effects.

Priming is a memory bias that describes how we perceive words and objects. For example, we recognise the word ‘sea’ faster if it comes after the word ‘boat’ than the word ‘apple’, simply because we use confirmation bias and availability to look for words that are closely associated in our memory.

Priming was first identified by Vance Packard in 1957, but the last 20 years of research have really explored the limits of how priming can affect emotions, identity and behaviour. While we like to think we’re in control of everything we do, priming shows how we are influenced by our environment and circumstances without even realising it.

Priming in business

The effect of priming last anywhere from 15-20 minutes to up to two days with a constant effect (that is, is is not depreciated over time). Priming can cause a lot of damage, but how can you use it for good?

Obviously, you can employ priming to increase your own performance, mood, quality of work, efficiency, and so forth. But you can also use it to enhance your customers experience with your products:

• Avoid Accidental Priming: E.g. a checkbox in a newsletter indicating “we will never spam you” lead the customer to think about spamming and hesitate signing up. Or a “saving coupon” can prime your customers to think of ways of reducing their spending. So think throughly about how you prime your customers for action.
• Priming for Expected Experience: E.g. hearing aid adds primarily show healthy and active mid-aged customers using their hearing aid in all sorts of fun ways – this might turn away the real customers, the 65+ and elderly who aren’t active and can’t identify themselves with the people in the adds and might think the hearing aids aren’t for them.
• Priming for Desired Action: Let’s say you have a shopping mobile app with some onboarding walkthrough screens, describing the features of the app. In one of the screens, you show the users how to access the categories screen. Next to the text explaining how to do that, you also have a nice blue icon illustrating a sketched iPhone, whose apparent sole function is to accompany the text. In reality, the icon acts as a prime, so that when the users get to the screen containing the categories, they will choose the blue Electronics category, as their first interaction.

If you want to hear more about priming, check out our previous post on power poses or reach out – we’re always happy to help.

Sources:

• https://conversionxl.com/how-to-use-priming-to-improve-ux/
• Our coming book: Decision Strategy (more to come!)